By Brian Willingham
A private investigator’s world is messy. Having a personal code of ethics can help us navigate the rougher waters.
This may be breaking news for you, but private investigators are not known as the most ethical group of people.
I know: a shocker. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the results of a poll we did a few years ago: Turns out, a lot of folks think PIs are resourceful but shady, and are willing to break the law if it means breaking open a case.
I’ve always found this kind of ironic. I thought we were supposed to be the good guys — the ones fighting fraud, digging for facts, and protecting people who need our help.
But there’s definitely a “dark side” to our business — bad actors making embarrassing headlines. What brings investigators to make such terrible decisions, with little regard to ethics or the law?
I struggle to wrap my head around that.
When Unethical Behavior Hits Close to Home
No matter how bad the public perception of the private investigative industry is, my own opinion may actually be worse. I know hundreds of incredible investigators who do work completely above board, but a few recent personal experiences might explain my skepticism.
A few weeks ago, while scrolling through Instagram, I stumbled upon a screenshot of a graphic that said, “If investigating was easy, it would be called Googling.” Witty and catchy, I thought. Might even make a great t-shirt.
It’s a great idea for a meme, if I do say so myself. And it’s no wonder I think so, because it was my idea in the first place. I created the graphic and posted it back in November 2019 on my social media profiles.
The graphic that appeared on Instagram was exactly the same as the one we posted last year, but with our logo cropped off — giving us zero credit.
The graphic that appeared on Instagram was exactly the same as the one we posted last year, but with our logo cropped off — giving us zero credit.
When I emailed the investigator who posted it, his reply was, in essence: “It’s social media. That’s what people do – steal stuff.”
Seriously?
I was infuriated. For years, I’ve been calling out other investigative firms for copying my blogposts word for word and reposting the articles as their own. Every time I called someone out, they’d find some other person to blame: the web guy or the copywriter or the man on the grassy knoll.
I chalked it up to folks being too lazy to do the writing themselves. But all this has left a bitter taste in my mouth toward some of my colleagues, and has not, I’m sorry to say, made me particularly eager to help out fellow investigators. (Like the guy who called up a few weeks back looking for a sample background check report so that he could use it as a template for his business. Really?)
And then, a fellow New York investigator told me this story, about a presentation he gave on the topic of ethics — and the rules that bind investigators to the professional ethics of the the lawyers who hire them. After the talk, he overheard two private investigators who were ex-NYPD detectives murmuring, “If we did what you said, we’d be out of business!”
Wink, wink.
Ethics Failures in the News
While those personal experiences certainly didn’t help, the news was even worse.
The year 2019 was a banner one for private investigators. There were stories about private investigators who were sentenced for making false pretext calls to get personal banking information; a private investigator having sex with a prisoner; a Florida investigator who pled guilty to scamming Colombian drug traffickers; and a former TV personality PI who was jailed for promoting prostitution and unlawful surveillance — for enticing a man into having sex with prostitutes, then surreptitiously recording the sex acts.
You just can’t make these stories up.
I’ve heard the argument before: every business has bad apples. Sure, but bushels of bad apples?
And then there was Ronan Farrow’s three–part story, published in The New Yorker in October 2019, about the Israel-based “intelligence firm,” Black Cube. As I wrote in October, the article exposed a dark underbelly of our profession: a firm willing to obtain any information at any cost; operatives using shady tactics like fake websites, cell phone tracking and false identities.
In essence, Black Cube and its agents went far beyond helping to defend an accused client. They used aliases and lies to get close to Harvey Weinstein’s accusers and the reporters covering the story — in effect, serving as his henchmen.
They played the heavy — for a hefty fee.
As a private investigator, I hold myself to a higher ethical standard. There are plenty of things I won’t do for money. Every week I agonize over ethical and moral questions, like whether we should take on a certain client, what investigative methods to use, or how far we’ll go to help a client’s case.
Sometimes, it feels like I’m alone in all this agonizing. But I choose to believe there are others like me, who are quietly struggling to sort out the ethical quandaries they face in their investigative practices.
For them, my fellow sufferers, I’ll share a few challenging situations we’ve dealt with over the years at Diligentia Group, and how we chose to resolve them:
The Customer Is Not Always Right
In 2016, an attorney client called, upset that we were unable to verify a university degree in a foreign country. I explained that privacy laws in that country prevented us from getting the information.
Dissatisfied with my response, the attorney called the university and was able to confirm that the person had never received a degree, which we’d suspected all along.
When I asked the attorney how he verified the information, he said, “I told them that I was hiring him.”
“So you lied to them?” I said.
“That’s how you get information,” the attorney responded.
I explained that I wasn’t willing to break privacy laws (even outside my country), or to risk my license or reputation, to lie about why I was asking for information.
I could have easily justified lying to the foreign university. The person I was investigating was a rabid liar, and I was about 98.7 percent sure that the degree was a figment of someone’s imagination. Of course, I wasn’t violating any U.S. laws; only foreign privacy laws — and good luck trying to prosecute me for that. Besides, nobody would ever know how I got the information.
But guess what? I wasn’t going to be bullied into crossing my own ethical lines, simply because my client was obsessed with disproving a degree. This attorney was in a business dispute with the subject, and things had gotten personal. This detail, frankly, didn’t add anything important to the case.
In exchange for my resistance, I earned myself an irate client, one who has caused me more headaches than I’d like to admit.
Choose Your Clients Wisely
As a private investigator, we get interesting inquiries on a daily basis, ranging from the mundane to the OMG, WTF?
A few years ago, we were asked if we could break into an apartment and steal a copy of an ex’s tax returns. [That’s on the OMG, WTF end of the spectrum, in case you hadn’t guessed.]
More frequently, we get some ominous request for (typically) a male looking for a female that he “lost touch with.” Or just some random person on the Internet who wants to find someone they’ve lost touch with because they “forgot the number.”
Now, breaking into someone’s apartment is obviously illegal, no matter what the reason.
But is it illegal to track someone down on behalf of a sketchy client? Absolutely not. But what if that sketchy client ends up stalking, hurting, or worse — killing the person they hired you to find? This has actually happened.
I believe we have a moral and ethical obligation to understand why our client wants the information, and how they plan to use it. In most cases, I’ll contact the person we’re looking for first, to make sure it’s OK to pass along their information. That scares away about 99 percent of sketchy clients who are up to no good.
Do I know with 100% certainty what my client’s ultimate objectives are? No. But I’ll do my best to figure it out. Yup. Even a hint of shady behavior, I am walking.
Bending the Facts
A few years ago, we were hired by an investment firm to do an in-depth background investigation on a few principals of a company they were acquiring an interest in. Investment firms have a responsibility to their investors to do their due diligence and ensure they’re making sound business decisions.
We found a few odd things about the CEO of the company. The background check identified undisclosed criminal history and multiple lawsuits that he “forgot” to divulge, including a divorce and a recent eviction. The biggest red flag was that he had gone by a completely different name through at least his college years. Not exactly the type of guy you want running a multi-million-dollar company.
When we reported our findings, the investment firm told us they already knew most of that information. And then they asked us to “tone down” the language in the report to avoid scaring away their investors.
What the investment firm chose to disclose to their clients was certainly up to them. Sure, their guy didn’t look so good on paper, but that was a problem they’d have to face with the investors. Our report was based on public documents, open sources, and facts, and I wasn’t inclined to change it.
After all, that would kind of miss the whole point of due diligence.
Did it cross my mind to tone down the language and make our client happy? Of course it did. I spoke to other investigators about how to handle it. I spent several agonizing days on it.
I didn’t want to deal with potential fallout from a well-paying client. But I also didn’t want to bend my ethics.
In the end, we didn’t alter our report.
And we didn’t lose the client.
Frankly, if we did, I’m not sure that’s the kind of client I’d want, anyway.
Why Does This Business Have Bad Actors?
There are a few common threads running through all these ethical lapses.
The first is financial pressure. This business has lots of ups and downs. Weeks and months of crazy, non-stop work, followed by periods of twiddling thumbs. The down times are tough and scary, especially for tiny firms. They can tempt you to take on work that you wouldn’t normally do, or encourage you to bend the rules a bit, because you want to keep a client happy.
The second thread stems from the first: pressure to get information. The prime reason for that, to my mind, is that clients don’t understand that we can’t promise a specific result. You call a contractor to fix a leaky roof, you expect no more water to come in. You hire an accountant to do your taxes, you expect no IRS agents to come knocking.
But if you hire an investigator to follow a cheating spouse, you can’t expect a smoking gun. After all, it’s not as easy as it looks on the TV show Cheaters, where everything always goes perfectly. In the real world, 52 things can and will go wrong on any given day.
Still, because so many of us work in a bubble of solitude, it’s easy to assume that our “competitors” are getting the goods while we’re getting zero.
Making Ethical Choices
Private investigators, unlike attorneys, are not bound to any ethical oath. While there are some great investigative organizations out there (such as the World Association of Detectives) that do have an ethical oath, joining isn’t mandatory. So there’s really no accountability besides the few guidelines governing state licenses. But frankly, I have little faith that the states are investigating lapses in ethics.
And while some organizations require ethical training each year (the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners comes to mind), most states don’t require any continuing education training at all, let alone ethics training.
I don’t want to pretend that I am Mr. Ethics. But I do take ethics seriously, and I spend time working through the tough ethical issues and pressures I routinely face.
Here are some of the conclusions I’ve come to:
- Don’t make ethical decisions in a vacuum. Talk to others, including people in other professions.
- Do not take on a case purely for financial reasons. It will always bite you in the ass.
- If you have a decision that floats into an ethical grey area, don’t do anything that may undermine your license, reputation, or client’s best interest. It takes 20 years to build a reputation and a blink of an eye to ruin it.
- Surround yourself with good people who will give you an honest opinion.
- When making important ethical decisions, think of this: if you are ever asked to testify to your actions, how do you think a jury of your peers will judge you?
- Critical information obtained through illicit means (bribes, illegal sources, etc.) can still be valuable, even if it can’t be used in a court of law. While that may be true, it certainly brings up serious legal implications.
- Ultimately, what kind of person do you want to be? Is your behavior consistent with that goal?
About the Author:
Brian Willingham is a New York private investigator, Certified Fraud Examiner, and founder of Diligentia Group. To read more Willingham wisdom, check out his blog and his previous stories for PursuitMag.
See also:
Why a Code of Ethics Is a Private Investigator’s Best Friend
